What is Creative Automation?

By Celtra

what is Creative Automation by Celtra?

Automation has changed how media is bought and handled. It’s time for design production to go through the same shift. With media moving in real-time, brands need to keep up by pushing out more content to match consumer expectations. It can be challenging. Content scaling can be expensive with slow and cumbersome creative processes, generic ad experiences, and inconsistent designs. Brands just can’t turn to old-fashioned creative production anymore. The answer is Creative Automation.

What is Creative Automation?

Creative automation is a software for marketing and creative professionals to remove design repetition tasks for high-volume advertising campaigns. It changes how brands digitally advertise by having a tool that takes away the pain of manually cropping, resizing, and laying out image ads. A commissioned Forrester study on behalf of Celtra found that 77% of marketers believe they could benefit from an automated digital advertising strategy.

Why haven’t marketers adopted automation yet? It’s the lack of awareness that this technology exists. Creative automation is a new concept and very different from the traditional campaign launch process many marketers are accustomed to.

We’re here to make creative automation a little less foreign. These are the core elements and benefits.

How does Creative Automation help?

3X faster creative production

Creative automation speeds up the production process. Even with more assets, brands can connect with their consumers on a more personal level. When you’re able to move 3 times faster, a lot happens:

  1. Run always-on media with the ability to change content as needed.
  2. Roll out relevant creatives easily and make changes on the go.
  3. Spend more time on creative ideation once tedious design tasks are automated.

Brands are aware of this problem. The Forrester study also found that 51% listed increasing the speed of creative development as their goal in the next 5 years.

Watch how Creative Automation works:

Why do brands use Creative Automation to increase production speed?

Building thousands of creatives made easy

Creative automation allows designers to execute their vision swiftly and then scale it. Here are the key features that make building thousands of creatives less tedious:

  • Craft global creative templates with animation, motion graphics, gamification, product galleries, and more
  • Create for all channels with built-in format specs and responsive design
  • Organize and populate text and images into feeds for faster localization
  • Connect master templates to content feeds to produce creative variations

Collaborative production workflows for marketing and creative teams

Centralizing your creative production unifies teams. Ideas can be relayed faster with tools that allow for easier collaboration. Since review and approval can be handled within the software, back and forth emails with JPEGs are replaced with a single place to access all creatives.

This is how marketing and creative teams collaborate in Celtra:

  • Preview all image ads through a single URL
  • Comment, reply, resolve and change tracking in one single place
  • All stakeholders can access commenting, even if they’re not Celtra users
  • Easy access to unresolved comments and pending responses

Watch how teams review and collaborate faster with Creative Automation:

Global templates and localization for regional teams

Handling a high volume of local market asset requests can be a lot to manage. Instead, global teams can use creative automation to design master templates for regional teams. They can then resize, reformat, and personalize to suit their market needs. This allows for the best of both worlds – consistent branding and localized messages. Ultimately, creative automation enables a global market reach that would otherwise be unattainable.

Why hasn’t this become the norm? According to the Forrester study, only 24% of marketers state that their localization operations are mostly automated. At the same time, 83% predict a positive or critical positive impact from creative automation on improving and increasing localization efforts. Again, it’s apparent that brands are skittish about converting their knowledge into action. Yet, brands who adopt creative automation earlier will be able to out-market their competitors.

Watch how global toolkits are created easily on Celtra:

Avoid errors from copying and pasting

Brands with a digital advertising presence are faced with a very daunting task — how can you prevent error when producing 1000s of ads? Creative automation can help by generating variations without manually adjusting creatives one by one. Additionally, the software pushes the creative directly into the proper channel, rather than manually copying and pasting. That further lessens the chance for mistakes.

Keep audiences engaged online

Sending out messages only works if they have an impact. To ensure this, the content must be relevant. Creative automation covers this too. The Forrester report asked organizations which benefits they would expect from an automated creative production approach. The leading answer was higher customer engagement (41%).

Unfortunately, simple targeting isn’t going to cut it anymore. You need a more sophisticated approach that is rooted in skilful and personalized storytelling. Showcasing more advertising options enhances your brand’s relevance. With that, you will have more opportunities to run tailored stories to a wider audience.

Who is using creative automation tools?

Celtra’s customer, Lazada, is championing creative automation. The boom in e-commerce amid the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them to run more personalized campaigns in the Philippines. To produce 2,500 creative variants in less than 2 weeks while maintaining brand consistency, Lazada recognized the need to make a transformative shift.

The Forrester report reveals that more than half of brands don’t have the technology to assist with digital advertising content creation. That’s a problem. Rather than cherry-picking tools to help segments of the process, brands should consider an all-in-one creative automation solution. It’s the most beneficial way to hit all of your marks.

Read the full Forrester study here. To learn more about creative automation, reach out to us today.

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